February 22, 2012

Karla!

I tend to agree with Keith – the ‘Russian Group’ leaking Murray McCully’s emails have no reason whatsoever to redact the email address of the person who sent the least discreet email, and leave all the other addresses and phone numbers intact. So that suggests a domestic source and domestic agenda. The header for the leak reads:

Privet.

Товарищи hacked into Foreign Affairs Ministers email account. This is year ago.

We see reports from New Zealand tv. It show some emails. We will leak the emails he talk about.

This is not important to us. This is skid stuff. We move onto more things now.

(Sorry for bad english).

– Long Live RBN

– @TheComradez

до свидания

RBN is the Russian Business Network, a Russian based cyber-crime organisation. But the cyrillic text in the emails are the Russian words for ‘comrade’ and ‘goodbye’, and you can just cut and paste it from the wiktionary pages for the term.

But why would anyone leak these emails? The obvious conspiracy theory is that the main email concerns waste at MFAT, and its been leaked a day before the government cuts hundreds of jobs from that organisation. But that would be a weird, pointlessly elaborate way to get that information out there, when McCully’s press sec can just take an email like that to any media organisation and ask them to put it on their front page as an ‘exclusive leak’, ‘our investigations have revealed . . .’ ect.